Toby Burton’s story is going to blow your mind. He conveys with such clarity that while so many of our barriers to career success are caused by external forces, ultimately we have to dig deep and strengthen our reserves of resilience and confidence to push back against those things. 

Toby is currently Chief Financial Officer of Fastmarkets. Their annual revenue exceeds 100 million. He began his career at Unilever and became a qualified accountant while there. He then found his way to The Economist and sat at the very heart of news, politics and finance and eventually became CFO to the Economist Group’s publishing business responsible for 300 million of revenues. 

Toby was born profoundly deaf and has never used speech. He shares a story about being undermined as a 9-year old boy by one of his teachers. I would imagine everyone who has navigated work while living with disability will have experienced a similar moment when maybe a colleague has been blatant in their view that you cannot do something and you reach a crossroads of choice about what you do with that view. Toby decided to prove his teacher wrong and his career is testament to what you have to do to build inner confidence. 

His story of flunking a really important board presentation about stock cubes because of not being able to get the right interpreters is a powerful one. Does he blame the lack of interpreters? No. Does he believe his poor performance is not fixable? No. Does he blame his colleagues for not noticing he had interpreters who were unfamiliar to finance? No.

As you listen to the film, you will hear his powerful truth that no matter how good your organisation is in relation to its own track record of getting it right, there is no way they will know your own unique adjustment needs. So relying on others to set something up for you is never going to work. 

He leads. He takes control of his story, his brand, his adjustment needs, his career trajectory. His lessons are powerful and I learnt so much, as I expect you will too. 

 These interviews are brought to you with thanks to remarkable people choosing to share their learning about developing inner confidence so that others can learn faster. 

The first tranche of six films is brought to you with thanks to LSEG who are working to build a culture of belonging for everybody and accessibility is a key part of that. 

Once you have listened, we ask one thing from you: send the link to the film to five others who you think might be able to pass on the messages to five others. 

We are on a mission at PurpleSpace to cascade a universal definition of inner confidence as a strong expectation of a positive outcome and to share the practical things we can do to navigate our working worlds while managing disability.

Enjoy this film.

For PurpleSpace members wanting further information about how to build inner confidence of their ERG/Network members, visit our resource hub.

Transcript(47.50kB) 

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